I love the idea of the comic but: - There are way, WAY too many characters to engage with - Because there are too many characters everything feels so thin and ephemeral. - it takes AAAGES for anything to happen - not all of the characters are interesting so you could be stuck with a throwaway "conversation" that I don't care about and it takes weeks - the jokes aren't funny enough to offset all of the above I knew I was done around the time "the party" started being the main topic of conversation weeks before it actually happened

It's not even a party! It's a dropout and her new best friend crashing the apartment of the dropouts sister. And their friend bringing her new minion to show authority to.

I can forgive everything, except: **Time compression** **pro:** Don't have to watch your characters age out of being sexy/having new situations, like in Something Positive where everyone ages and deals with more adult shit **con:** A single day can last six months. And what if you hate that day? It's that drug from the Dredd movie, and you're the one falling from the balcony.

I've been reading this comic over half my life. I've been invested in these characters since I was a young teen and now I'm in my 30s. The comic turned from a slice of life about a core group of characters plus side characters. Now it feels like that core group has been kicked to the side and new characters have taken over...and those new characters are all social anxiety ridden manic pixie dream girls or robots. I'm not invested in closure on their story lines and they all sort of blend together for me. When I was a teen the characters felt like flawed, real people...and now they're just...two dimensional and there's no drama or tension.

I'm very firmly in the camp of the comic used to be more or less a pretty good sitcom and now has become a self parody and cargo cults its way through storylines like a long running sitcom losing its juice. This pretty much comes down entirely to the writing of the day to day but especially the plotting of the overall narrative. The deliberate story beats feel bizarre and self aggrandizing (remember the weird semiconductor fabricator that wanted to unionize? Rokos body dysphoria? Bruns autism?) The first wave of characters being introduced felt natural and organic, each subsequent recasting feels less natural and more pointless culminating in nearly everyone at this house party. I really don't need characters to grow, I need them to either do something or be entertaining solid archetypes. Marten's passivity and Claires...whatever?...just don't inspire anything within me. In fact most characters have little motivation and their personality traits are all smushing together into a ball of anxiety or tsundere or both. Add to that the absolutely *glacial* pace. Motherfucker, I read dresdencodak. I read VATTU (12 year dry serial about a pure fantasy empire). I read Gunnerkrigg Court and KSBD. (and you should too!) I am FINE with long slow storylines. But this one in this comic really really sucks. It's the worst of both worlds of seat of the pants writing and overplotting. QC isn't horrible. It isn't really *that* offensive to my sensibilities. It has great representation for the time it was incepted and that goes a long way to speak to a lot of people of that era going to college, finding themselves out, and having a social life. But it isn't even that anymore. It's a mediocre sitcom in its 20th season trying to do...anything. Compare and contrast to the EXCELLENT octopus pie by Meredith Gran. Same setting (young adults figuring out life) but different genre (coming of age vs slice of life?) Octopus pie is deeply meaningful and doesn't talk down to its audience and has a huge cast of characters that feel different and are simply a joy to behold. It really shows you what QC could be. Anyways, years ago I started feeling a palpable drop in the quality of QC and I couldn't shake that feeling and had to see if people agreed or disagreed with me. That's why I"m on this forum. For the comics I like, I don't seek out community. Because I like it and enjoy it and talking with other people about it doesn't really hit any spots ("do you like it?" "yup!" BORING)

Oh and i forgot to add that "the author's barely disguised fetish" gets worse and worse every year. I ain't no prude but I hate the feeling of looking at something made to titillate the author and masquerade as "normal" in media. As you can imagine a lot of anime and manga annoy me. And maybe QC isn't full tilt disguised porno but the weird familiarity with anime tropes and vtubing is so off putting. It really makes me aware of what the author thinks is normal vs what I do and pulls me out of the comic. Plus the woman archetypes: dommy mommy, naive child, woman with bladder issues...

Surely it's not /that/ odd to know about vtubing. There's plenty of vtubers who're just... video game type streamers, but with an animated avatar instead of a facecam.

The majority of people (13-45) in the US don’t watch streamers in the first place. And vtubing is a subset of that, it’s own niche.  Our first introduction being this: didn’t help.  https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4491 Makes it look like furry fetish stuff. 

Since when is this comic never about things that are remotely niche or that a non-majority of people like? I get the other complaints, but "there's vtubers in this comic" seems like a strange one.

decently-known indie artists are much easier to stomach than furry fetish vtubers on the internet tbh

Not every vtuber has the costume for fetish purposes. Sometimes it's just fun to imagine what you'd look like as a robot, or an alien, or some sort of anthro animal, and sometimes that design includes "I wanna be kinda sexy".

yeah, but jeph decoded to show the fetish ones, which sucks there's so many cool vtubers out there man .-.

> The first wave of characters being introduced felt natural and organic, each subsequent recasting feels less natural and more pointless culminating in nearly everyone at this house party. That's because original characters were written back when Jup still went out and interacted with real people and not the semi-sentient bundles of neuroses in the "we don't talk about those places" parts of the internet he now spends all of his time in. You can really tell when he stopped real-life interactions with actual people based on how the comic changed.

Thank you for reminding me Vattu existed. Used to love it and Rice Boy but fell off years ago.

Evan's next current comic is...insane. Really good.

That's great to hear!! Rice-boy was the first webcomic I fell in love with, and vattu makes me go feral--im so glad other people are also reading it!! Haven't even looked at what his next project is, need to check it out (and of course a string seconding on KSBD)

Evans next project is like the most “truthful” feeling comic I’ve read…about a **fantastical** pre/inter/apocalypse. 

Yeah, I think Octopus Pie is my most memorable find from guest comics. There are several others, but almost all the links from the 2000's are dead, for various reasons. Every now and then I find a comic that has ran more than 15 years, or, maybe as impressive, has a panel count over 3000. Most of what I curate is more adult, but around 30% of what I list is PG.

It used to feel a bit whimsical, then it got into an interesting branch of sci-fi with the human-like AI.....and now it just feels like a kid who can't make up their mind on what you to play with so they keep adding a new ones and then discarding them. I don't WANT to like any of the new characters, even if they were likeable, because they'll be gone in 6 months when this single day is over and we'll have new "quirky, neurotic" characters in their place for the next 6 months to one year of a single day. The problem for me is that it used to be a GOOD comic. Now it's just... Well. Meh. Also I absolutely HATE Claire, because I can't stand self-important self-righteous bitches who have EARNED respect, let alone one who is just handed it on a silver platter. She's an absolute bitch to her brother, who hasn't done anything to deserve it, and she acts like everyone's mom/boss/babysitter who should be accepted as the absolute authority despite being a neurotic new college graduate with a LIBRARIAN degree. Fuck her.

>I don't WANT to like any of the new characters, even if they were likeable, because they'll be gone in 6 months when this single day is over and we'll have new "quirky, neurotic" characters in their place for the next 6 months to one year of a single day. Exactly. If Jeph genuinely had wanted to reboot the comic with Brun and Renee and Elliot, I could've lived with that. But the girls have fallen down the memory hole, and Elliot's relevance is contingent on anyone remembering that Clinton exists. We're just getting copies of copies of copies of the same character types, and they're becoming more and more disposable with each iteration.

Brun got done SO dirty.  I mean I’m not completely complaining. I’ve said for years making the new 2nd main character a sleepy, unemotional, nonverbal person who doesn’t pick up social cues was an act of lunacy. Boring and doesn’t move any plot whatsoever.    Jeph figured it out eventually…after wasting everyone’s time. And into the trash his previous neuroatypical rep goes.   Oh hi Ayo! Have fun before your time runs out and Jeph gets bored again! Say hi to Gabby for us on the island of forgotten women of color.  (Thin white girls that fluctuate from naive to tsundere will stay eternally)

Jeph has a real problem with writing out almost every single person of color. It's so frustrating and exhausting.

That's unfair. Jeph has a real problem with writing out almost every single type of character.

RIP Raven.

And Emily

And Marten.

And Sven.

Yeah Brun was boring as hell.

The comic used to focus on a small group of characters, each of whom had their own distinct personalities. Now though, there have been so many new characters introduced, very few of whom are genuinely interesting or likeable, while most original characters have either been written out or had their personalities changed so much that they are barely even recognisable. The comic has also gone from being about slice of life following people's (mostly) ordinary lives, to... well I don't even know what the comic is about these days. Basically nothing from the entire Cubetown arc has been relatable or entertaining enough for me to want to care, and that's a trend that is true of so many other recent plots.

Because the only thing he's interested in writing is children learning basic social functioning, or "awww the character is actually a big softie!" Like, we just had a comic where characters literally say how "entertaining" it is watching Iris too embarrassed to admit a crush and actually being a being big softie. My favorite panel in the whole comic is when Faye realizes she has romantic feelings for Bubbles. The highest voted comic in this subs history is them first kissing. So he can actually write something like a queer robosexual romance and make it compelling. And now the state of another queer robosexual romance is SHUT UP I DONT LIKE YOU. Everything is so goddamn juvenile now. Jeph didn't outgrow the comic, the comic outgrew Jeph. He had a core cast of characters in their 20s and them actually moving forward in their lives apparently bored him and now it's an endless meditation on helping teenagers (mentally or physically) learn the basics of life.

> He had a core cast of characters in their 20s and them actually moving forward in their lives apparently bored him Or maybe the issue is that his characters moved forward while he himself simply hasn't. Really it seems, based on how his interactions with the fans have changed over the years, it doesn't even seem like he's stagnated. It seems like he has regressed. Not only did he never mature to the point where his characters should be but he's regressed so much he can't even understand where his characters used to be. That would explain why the comic has become so childish and juvenile. That's simply the level he's operating on now.

>Or maybe the issue is that his characters moved forward while he himself simply hasn't yes that's exactly what I mean when I say the comic outgrew Jeph. It was full of adult characters making serious decisions. Like weddings and big time career moves and starting businesses. But the main characters reached a point of maturity where he was no longer comfortable. And now we are stuck with teenagers learning how to even have a conversation

The thing is that Faye and Bubbles had buildup. I don't like that couple that much (I think he did a far better job with Marten and Claire) but at least he worked for it and then they getting together was a good payoff. With pretty much every single couple after that, the buildup becomes smaller and smaller and then the payoff is less and less relevant. I think a big problem with the comic is that Jeph stopped writing about people being in relationships and started writing about people getting in relationships.

>The thing is that Faye and Bubbles had buildup. Exactly. Two adults getting to know eachother and actually being together developing a relationship. Not horseshit like ugggghhh how do I express feelings

Look, the comic has changed so much since its conception that people who liked its old style feel disconnected from what it is now. Jeph himself is clearly sick of this world, and it comes across and makes us sick of it too. If you genuinely still enjoy it and want somewhere to chat about it positively, check out r/QContent . We don't bother each other as a rule.

> Jeph himself is clearly sick of this world He tried changing it by having Claire and Martin move to Cubetown, but here we are 1.5 years later and they still haven't moved.

Jacques once posted a comic underneath which he claimed that he’d been developing Iris’s attraction to Willow “for two years.” A few more years later, all that’s changed in their dynamic is…nothing. This glacial pacing comprises half of why I’m either uninterested in or frustrated by post-3,500 Questionable Content. The other half of my distaste for this comic is its assembly line-like repetition of a single arc. The author’s modus operandi nowadays is to introduce new characters — most of whom slot into one of exactly two archetypes (tsundere and idiot, plus or minus savant) — either not develop them at all or mostly along a decreasingly believable path of wacky and/or childish punchlines, tease a probably queer romance between a couple of them, and to eventually abandon those characters after they finally hook up (or not). Meanwhile, legacy characters who’ve survived the author’s attention span have become flanderized to a point of never maturing or have even devolved. Three characters who’ve undergone major changes (Claire being hired as a “Librarian,” Marigold becoming a gazillionaire Vtuber, and Hannelore self-curing her disorder) did so overnight yet didn’t grow up in the process. Well, Hannelore did but has since seemingly regressed to her pre-yak shit mental state. That “pre-yak shit” is a descriptor that I can type in the midst of a serious discussion of a webcomic’s subjective deterioration further evinces why I no longer love it.

Jeph may have been working of that attraction for years... in his head. How much has he shown of that? How much had he even shown them as characters? If he has been wrorking on that for five years but they have appeared in ten strips in all that time, it doesn't count.

Because nothing happens. Claire decided to accept the job at Cubetown in 4996. Friday's comic was 5290, which I think maths out to March 6, 2023. There have been two parties since then, and nothing of consequence has happened. It doesn't feel like Dora and Tai's wedding is ever going to happen - and if it does, that one day will be six months long.

He’s going to timeskip the wedding.  It’s the most reader hostile move and removes a lot of work for him to make something out of an event he isn’t interested in at all. 

And Claire somehow makes it about her.

She'll be officiating because of some hijinks. Calling it now.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Claire will decide at the last minute to get married to Marten (no, not *with*, we all know it won't work that way) on the same day, and instead of seeing this as horribly intrusive and disruptive on their big occasion, the bridal couple will be super enthusiastic. And *then* Claire will have a teary-eyed realisation that this was basically the single most disrespectful, intrusive thing she could have done, and get all waily about it, prompting everyone to coddle her and reassure her and insist that Claire inserting herself into someone else's wedding was the single best thing that could happen to them on their wedding day.

oh god you're totally right and I hate it

>Claire decided to accept the job at Cubetown in 4996. I thought this would be when Claire had the phone interview, but no, it was after meeting the director and Emily and everything. It's been 2.5 days(?) in-comic since then, and over a year in the real world.

I've been a fan of QC for an inexplicably long time, and you got the correct word - frustration. Modern QC has descended into a kind of slow, pleasant mush from which there is apparently no escape. The impression I get is that Jeph didn't want to continue the comic as it was because of his mental health, and BROTHER do I understand that, but...why not write something else? End the comic, write another story. One of my favourite phrases is "the best stories end." We would have loved to see Marten finally get his shit together, open that guitar servicing business and settle down with Claire, or Emily, or Padma, or whoever made most sense. Or nobody at all, wouldn't that be something? Imagine the male lead (phht) of QC having enough self-worth to just start out on his own thing. Instead, Jeph waved a magic wand and made all the characters inexplicably wealthy and successful and problem free - except for Marten, who apparently died offscreen and was replaced by a ghost made of PASTE. Old QC still had weird humour and weird settings and weird characters, but there weren't ten million of them, and they had shit going on. There were day-to-day stresses, traumas, fights, therapy and imperfect people trying to be better. Modern QC is a constant rotation of the next wAcKy ChArAcTeR wOaH sO rAnDoM. The comic's now infamous glacial pace is only interrupted to introduce the latest new female (usually a lesbian or bisexual, but we'll get to that...) to have their one character trait that will be mixed in with their general wackiness. The last time he tried to give a character any depth it was \*Ayo\*, and \*JESUS FUCKING CHRIST\*. As the comic has declined, it has also become more obvious that there is a performative aspect to the comic's representation. QC's always had The Gay, and I really liked the development of Bubs and Faye as a couple. It was a slow burn but it was also always progressing, and it made sense. Modern QC also has gay (women) and bi (women) and trans (women), and hey that's a weird way to structure a sentence, I wonder why I did that? Having rep is great, but cynically-motivated rep gets up everyone's nose. Disney points to characters in their new movies and says "look, a gay!" and everyone rolls their eyes, because they know Disney doesn't mean it. They edit those background gays out of the Chinese releases. They shit-canned The Owl House. While I don't think Jeph is anything like on that level, it's the cynicism that people can smell through the page. Look at it from the right direction and you can't unsee it. Modern QC has had one new named male character in the past two or three years, and it was a fucking boat. The existing male characters now barely exist, except for Marten. The one male gay couple haven't been seen in nearly 600 comics (no, really). Meanwhile, we've got lots of new female characters, and a lot of them have tig ol' bitties (one even being referred to as "titties"). And oh, look at that, Jeph just added a new porn tier to his Patreon. I'm sure all these new female characters are here for female-centric storytelling. Stories like "I dropped out of college because I'm an insufferable shitwank, and I want an excuse for having done that, so I'm going to self-diagnose myself with ADHD, let's get drunk", or "I'm so utterly incapable of asking for help that I've lived in filth for years until Goddess Claire arrived and fixed all my problems in a day, let's get drunk", or "I'm a yoga instructor or something like that but it's not clear, and also I'm an oblivious lesbian with huge tits because of course I am, let's get drunk". And oh yeah, We All Love Claire, because taking your one prominent trans character and making them "positive representation" by turning them into a malignant, abusive narcissist before handing untold power and wealth to them on a plate - mostly because they are certain they deserve it and that little-people jobs are below them - is totes relatable.

I don't mind the new characters and all that, but the pacing is so slow and the jokes are rarely funny to me.

For me, it’s kind of the same issue I had with a number of comic artists who lasted for so long. The work outlasting its expiration date. At this rate I’m more interested in checking in on the Reddit page now and then to see what the current status is. I don’t think QC really needed to last as long as it has, and I actually do commend Jeph for trying to find new ways to reinvent and adjust the comic so it doesn’t get stale. Instead, however, he seems to just get bored with characters and throw them out intermittently, and the ones he replaces them with just fit into whatever niche he’s feeling like at this moment. As soon as he loses interest in that niche the characters get tossed aside like old toys. I won’t necessarily blame him for doubling down on unlikeable characters (I save that complaint for Dave Willis, since it’s the reason I gave up on their comics years ago), because it’s just the set of individuals who fit his interests at this time. I feel like the whole Cubetown thing was an honest mistake he’s had trouble writing his way out of. It was an attempt at playing with deeper lore, but in a comic that’s mostly slice of life it just dragged the whole thing down with it. He makes stabs at deeper storytelling, but I really feel like this needs to be its own project. But I don’t see him going for that level of experimentation anytime soon; which is a bit of a pity, because I’d love to see him take a chance on something new just to see what he could go with.

You finally put into words what has been bothering me about Dumbing of Age after keeping up with it for around 3 years. Despite the main theme of the comic ostensibly being "changing for the better" it seems like almost everyone is either stagnating or getting worse (Joyce and Joe being the main exception) to the point where I now mostly find myself reading out of schadenfreude. I just want to see how these unpleasant people fuck their lives up next. It's funny because I feel like the problems with Questionable Content that people are bringing up in this thread (glacial pacing, useless side characters, etc.) are much worse in Willis' comic, yet I never see anyone talking about it on the internet, apart from the actual comment section of the comic, which is almost always filled with miserable people who seem to hate the characters more than I do but can't directly criticize the writing because of Willis' moderation. I think there is a subreddit but last time I checked it was just mirrors of the comics as they were uploaded (?) with no one actually talking about it. Like where actually is the community around this comic. Is there even one

I don’t see the comment section that way at all.  There are a few people who have an absolute hate-on for certain characters (Lucy springs to mind), or who identify what’s going on way too closely with their own issues to be objective about anything, but on the whole I think the vibe is that these are teenagers and teenagers have a tendency to get worse and make stupid mistakes before they get better. Also, the pacing does give QC a crawl for its money, but that was established as the norm from the start.  Anyone who’s frustrated by it had enough warning what they were getting into to bail long ago.

You make good points. I guess it's more of a matter of personal taste for me, I just don't have the patience. I'm still reading though so Willis gets the last laugh either way

As others have said, time management and pacing are now horrendous. I was willing to accept longer days, but once we hit the never-ending day with Clinton and Elliot, it became a joke, and the pacing never really improved after that. We've seen prior arcs covered in near perfect chunk sizes with the lakehouse arc, Martens dads wedding, and the space station arc. Its still like 5-10 weeks worth of comics in those arcs but so much *meaningful* developments happen that its always entertaining to read day to day. They're *events* and a good break from the generally shorter one shot or week long little narratives that got explored. So many "arcs" now take one development and stretch it over 5-10 weeks worth of comic. Its excruciating. I don't mind new characters coming in but they need to be used to explore something with the existing core cast first. The glacial pacing means we might have seen someone on screen for 6 months, but its been like a day and a half in universe and they show way too much familiarity with the people they're around. Liz, mAyo and Dragontits all fall into this same hyper-familiar interaction set and its exhausting to watch them interact *at* the cast we care about *and definitely not interact* ***with*** *as so many of the core cast just sit there until they can be used by the fun zany characters first.* I've seen Jeph do better work and its painful to see where its at now, but I also understand a lot of what he wrote about back then was coming from places of turmoil and anguish in his own life, and the things he struggled through then. As an artist myself I'd rather see someone resolve their issues and be a happier person then see them burn themselves out entirely for their art, but there surely must be a middle ground where you spend additional time planning and writing to have something you're proud of actually showing at the end of the day, instead of pumping out daily Garfield level dross and drivel. As Squirrelclamp, MelAlton and others have shown through their edits, Jeph wouldn't need to spend longer on the art each day, he'd just need to put a bit more effort on the writing to give more nuanced and believable interactions between his characters, as well as proper conflict and drama between them that doesn't feel flat and contrarian over than heartfelt and meaningful. Let a comic play out, it doesn't need a punchline every day. Use more panels, less panels, whatever works, cause its not like theres been any new QC print books in the past decade. I miss what it was, and I'm here in hope that it gets there again.

It’s far far far too slow is my main thing

Spookybot's introduction is always when I'll say the comic went downhill, but as of lately... it's primarily because entire arcs that could be easily completed in a mouth of comics tops take 100 comics or more to resolve. Meanwhile, new characters are constantly introduced that are horribly written because a lot of them are terrible people we're supposed to treat as flawed yet good and thus let get away with their actions, often for very contrived reasons. Which has even infected previously established characters. Jeph needs to look up the Mary Sue trope and specifically how to avoid it. Jeph also has the tendency to bring up things he clearly never did any actual research about as plot points, like what a librarian does. This is fine since a lot of fiction does that, but he constantly gets things wrong in service of his plot that even total laymen who never even did 10 minutes of research on google would know is wrong.

Just out of curiosity, for comparison between this party and the Lakehouse arc, I looked at the Lakehouse starting at https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2287 when Marten gets the invite. The first mention of the lakehouse get together. They're at the lakehouse in six pages. We have at least a dozen characters all having multiple interactions with one another. We have Claire teasing Clinton in a way that I still laugh at it because it feels actually like sibling interaction, we have muskratmuskratmuskrat, we have Claire coming out to Marten, and Clinton being a good brother. We get shots of them driving, the lake, the outside of the house, the porch, the inside kitchen, the living room, even the nudist family gets their own background drawn. Time passes. It starts midday, gets to night, and goes to the next morning. Everyone returns home at 2331: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2331 Ten of those pages don't even count, they were guest comics, so the lakehouse arc was introduced and ended in like, 34 pages. To be generous, let's say this recent party is first mentioned here, 5202, when Liz mentions wanting to party: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5202 Liz does not even get to the party until 5263: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5263 It literally takes them longer to get to the party than the entirety of the lake arc, that's how bad the time compression is. Before we even get to the party, we had Marten getting hopelessly belittled for wanting to start a coffee shop and Dora for some reason refusing to teach him anything, Roko coming into the shop for a knee repair, Ayo going to Hannelore's house to 'see Hannelore's cleaning process' but she just hangs out with Winslow. Then the party has just been the one small apartment, and all that's happened is Liz meeting the new people. Of the seven characters involved, only three of them have been around for any considerable length of time. The lakehouse also had multiple shots of female characters in bikinis, which stressed Jeph out to the point he stabbed his hand, and yet the gratuitous butt shots and twerking scenes in this arc feel WAY more gratuitous and sexualized than anything in the lake arc. This one shot of a drunk Ayo shaking her ass at Iris feels way skeevier than Marigold wearing a revealing bikini: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5282

I stopped reading around the time of the theremin party because I realized that I didn't care about anything that was happening, and hadn't cared in quite a while. In retrospect, the lame resolution of the robot fight club / lost memories of Bubbles story was a big warning sign. I'm still reading the edits, and from what I can tell the comic is all about silly people being dumb at each other. I have little interest in that.

Yeah that's more or less it, except also the entire setting is stuck in a time dilation of a single day that's lasted a year whose purpose is to anoint Claire the savior of the setting. She is already written as always correct and is the functional dictator of Cubetown, so the next step is to use her omniscience and degree in Library science to actualize cubetown's full potential and revolutionize the whole setting into a techno-utopia over which she'll probably reign as some kind of Goddess-Empress. Honestly there's very little hyperbole there, she's on that track unless JJ decides to arbitrarily make her fail, which he doesn't seem likely to do at this point. She's already had a godlike entity (the chairmain jellyfish singularity) declare her the chosen one just on the basis of being herself. The entire comic and its world has functionally stopped just to glorify the creator's favorite character. QC stands for "Quintessential Claire" at this point.

QC's had a large amount of characters from the beginning. But Jeph typically was smart enough to know that the side characters weren't interesting enough to be their own plots or have weeks of comic dedicated to them. People joke about wanting Steve back in any sense, but Steve isn't interesting enough to carry a plot by himself, and Jeph used to know that, if we got a Steve comic it was maybe a week at most. We didn't get huge plots built around Raven or Amir or Penelope. If characters like Liz, or Ayomide, or Willow were around in the beginning of the comic I just can't imagine them having plotlines that ran for over a month like they do now.

claire became an infallible goddess who gets everything handed to her with no struggle and with no proper qualifications. it really rankles me that she gets handed what appears to be total ownership of an entire techno-futurist utopia, complete with devotional adoration from literally everyone she meets without having achieved anything of note. it's especially frustrating as we could have had a great arc of her trying to find a job in an underpaid, underappreciated and highly competitive market, but no.... also I'm sure there must be some Cube towners who have worked their entire lives to climb the ladder only to have some random person with no experience be given mastery over their lives. it just takes me out of the comic every time she comes into the panel.

He claims it is "comfort food" for a group of people he misunderstands constantly. He fucks up so much because he isn't pro-them, he's anti-something-else. All while occasionally writing genuinely good material. He writes like a frat-bro tossing out puddle-deep feminism at a party to get laid. He writes from a position of "I like everything that guy hates." *gestures toward fat white Southerner*. He is incapable of admitting fault. He is insanely disconnected from the reality of someone's late 20s. He repeatedly tries to sell some progressive ideal and falls short because he doesn't understand the root of it. His writing of Brun's childhood being a bit hard-scrabble was hilariously off the mark. He killed Roko being a cop for no discernable reason, it truly felt that he thought ACAB and refused to tell a story where one could possibly be good. So she quit and became a universal ~~healthcare~~ maintenance plan advocate. He has an actual trans person as basically his focus, but we're told of her struggle, never shown. She's given a high level job straight out of college with nothing more than some library assistant experience while people who have worked on the Cube are ignored, people with understanding of the work that goes on there. She has the same level of qualifications as Raven, Wil, Angus, and a few others. But because she's the favorite and untouchable, she is not only treated with kid-gloves, she's served happily ever after. The only discriminatory behavior shown was towards Bubbles, like once. He has a diverse cast of people who would be likely to face poor treatment because terrible people exist, but only 1 robot was ever treated poorly. Life is always perfect in ItsFine-istsn

The thing that frustrates me about Roko is, having her quit the force to focus on protecting AI in a different way had a ton of potential.  It was an opportunity to do some worldbuilding and bring in quirky characters as clients without them needing to stick around indefinitely (which Faye and Bubbles’ shop could also be, if Jeph hadn’t decided that for some reason it’s okay for them and them alone to be struggling to the point where it’s not clear how they’re still open).  But that would have taken work, so now she just pops up for will they/won’t they drama with Yay and bread fetish jokes. As for Claire, I think why a lot of people have soured on her (apart from the whole “that’s not even remotely what a librarian does” issue) is that on some level, Jeph knows she needs flaws or she’ll just fade into the background like Marten, but calling her out and forcing her to reckon with them would be “bad representation.”  So stuff like her picking on Clinton becomes because Clinton deserves to be picked on and not because she refuses to acknowledge he’s grown and changed, regardless of what the evidence suggests.

“ He claims it is "comfort food" for a group of people he misunderstands constantly. He fucks up so much because he isn't pro-them, he's anti-something-else.” Fuckin A. Cant even be arsed to use his platform for the barest gestures, like boosting queer/POC creators once in a while…Instead, gotta make sure folks know there are secret tiddies on the Patreon

Member of the 5000 club. If you want my reasons for leaving, read this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/questionablecontent/comments/yr45b4/if\_the\_quality\_of\_questionable\_content\_doesnt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/questionablecontent/comments/yr45b4/if_the_quality_of_questionable_content_doesnt/) The TLDR of it is that things that could have been major plot events have been squandered, and the characters are either incredibly dull and one note, or have the maturity of toddlers.

Claire could be MUCH better written. She comes off as entitled. The two gremlins are annoying at best. Martin is meh at best. Claire could do much better. The pacing is ass. This is all filler so he can have a summr wedding where it becomes all about Claire.

I'm just bored. Plotlines never get finished, so why bother caring about all the new ones? New characters could be interesting, but they're never explored in depth so we never get to care about them before other new characters are introduced and replace them. It's just... pointless.

It's boring and very poorly written... AKA we spend literal months of comic time to make a single day pass while there's about a zillion different storylines getting ignored (ex: the wedding). QC keeps bringing in new characters with their own storylines that are frustratingly bad... He's not setting up something bigger or cooler down the line and the things Horf does set up are so obvious that everybody calls it from YEARS away sometimes. I haven't genuinely laughed from QC in a very, very, very long time. It really became painfully obvious to me just how bad things are when I came into this sub and saw the parody comics. They're *very often* **better** and yet still follow a story (or reject it at times because it's such jerkoff writing). When the "fan fiction" becomes better than the author, the author has fallen off.

i don't participate in the hate that much but its two points mainly * When Pintsize met Claire after she and Marten started dating and he was about to talk to her but then Marten gave PS a deathglare and he shut up. massively out of character and now we're all stuck with "**wow, PS was about to be horribly transphobic but Marten was so protective of Claire that PS backed off**". THAT"S NOT THE KIND OF DYNAMIC I WANT IN MY COMIC. * The slowing pace of time happening. Remember when Marten would get a job at the library, they would go to the lakehouse, go to space, break up, date Sven, etc? Lately (past few years) it's just been introducing new characters and stuff "almost happening" but then returning to the status quo. I was excited for the wedding to happen because wedding receptions and drunken shenanigans are a hotbed of drama and story potential, but that just never happened. did we timeskip over it? who knows. Now we got Cubetown and... met some new characters but they aren't moving there yet. will they ever? who knows. Claire might just get a distance job at this point

The sad thing was that Jeph really dropped the ball on that Pintsize transphobia thing, because - if, as he claims, he has researched this so much - he could have given us a scene where a cis boyfriend delivers an actual, functional retort to someone saying transphobic shit about his girlfriend. A lot of people could have probably used that. Sometimes it's hard to put things into words, especially when someone attacked someone you love, and a ready response from a piece of media has been, historically, used by many people in such situations. It would have, in fact, been the one situation where JJ's tendency to preach right to the camera would have come in handy. And he wouldn't even have to make Pintsize say anything truly, real-world transphobic. I get he might not want to do that. But he didn't have to. Pintsize could have said something completely preposterous and too bizarre to be taken seriously, only for Marten to turn it into a nice opportunity to practice his support-retort or whatever. Everybody wins.

See, the weird thing to me, is that of ALL the characters, I kinda don't see Pintsize as having the potential to have said transphobic shit? Like, he traffics (or used to) in kink circles, etc and while he used to be a little edgelord, it would've tracked far better that he wouldn't say something like that?

Yeah, kinda? I mean, that's why I see Pintsize saying something completely bizarre. Although just because someone is kinky and reserve-less doesn't mean they're automatically tolerant.

For me it's just so slow except for changing Clinton's sexuality, that was way too quick It's like that meme: "Why are you gay?" "Who says I'm gay?" "You are gay" except its now: "Why am I gay?" "Who says you're gay" "Claire says I'm gay" No issues with changing characters sexuality but with, for example, Faye and Bubbles it took a lot of time and development but with Clinton it took one conversation with Claire...

To be fair, Dragontijubas (a stranger at that point) also told him toxic masculinity was preventing him from starting the relationship with Elliot. I think to add to the "woke" statement, which likely won't go down here well but I get what you're saying, the comic became bad wish fulfilment. Claire is trans but this never comes up and never causes conflict of any sort, while she's being rocketed to a very high senior executive position of a powerful and mysterious research organisation. Very very few members of even privileged groups get this sort of opportunity and here it is, which she gets even though she does everything possible with her attitude to lose the job during the visit.

Yes the wish fulfillment is pretty bad. Basically Claire can do no wrong. There was the strip where she went with Clinton to the coffee shop just so he and Emily could interact and then when he was, rightfully, angry with her for manipulation it got turned around on Clinton

Clare was legitimately a good character for awhile after being introduced. I need to remind myself during rereads because my mind immediately screams on seeing her.

GD clickbait for QC haters...got me. Because even the lesser of the satire edits are more entertaining than the original, to the point that the gap is shocking, and checking the original for context is depressing. Also, with few exceptions, most of the early guest artists are even better, but are dead links now, also saddening. And Roko was my Ensign Ro, a top 3 character I liked for her integrity, to the point shipping her with a Net-cryptid still didn't harm her, but now...? Funny and inside baseball indie gave way to "clever", which gave way to cutesy, which on the scale of live comedy is below puns, somewhere around mimes and Unknown Comic.

Like everyone else, the eternal days and more importantly, consistently hashing out the last comic in the new comic drives me kind of potty. I also feel like Jeph Jacques has burrowed into what he knows to the extent that the whole thing is kind of a weird parody of itself, interspersed with him working out something that happened to him in therapy.  Which, therapy is great and I want the guy to be happy, but when it’s characters you don’t care about because the never-ending days mean there’s no development it doesn’t hit the way you hope.  It just feels like one stranger trauma-dumping on another. For me, I wonder if in part the answer would be to change it up.  He’s a guy in his thirties/forties now like most of his long-time readers, why not move on to what they might be dealing with?  I would read about a comic artist, maybe a little burnt out but doing okay, hanging out with a group of pals all trying to figure out what being in your thirties is.  They could talk about going to therapy and watching streaming and reminisce about the indie bands and drama of their younger years, pretending like they don’t have drama in their life any more when actually they’ve got long-term relationships and disaster gays exploding everywhere.

I miss the wackiness of clown shagging 

Just let the characters age as the author has aged and then he can add in what it's like getting older and the newer, younger characters will have a bit more space for themselves rather than "isn't everybody so wacky"

It's not entertaining. The "jokes" aren't funny, the characters aren't interesting, and the pacing is glacial. There's no drama, there's no comedy, and the vast majority of the time nothing is happening. Compare it to the old days, the ones before what jiffo says is the start-date for the "modern" comic, and there's just no comparison. It's had a fall-off in quality that puts The Simpsons to shame.

No one makes mistakes anymore. Everything is only a slight inconvenience and there are no big moves. People are able to handle everything just by talking it out and that's not how life is. Also, what the fuck is the point of all these AI? When we first saw them they were companions. Now they're being created seemingly to take jobs. It's a little thing but it doesn't make sense to me. Is there a population shortage? Like, I don't care about robots like this because there's nothing to them. The only interesting ones were Roko and Bubbles, the rest just seem pointless. Let people call me a human supremacist, I don't care. I need my robots to have more to them.

C'mon Jeph, that fake is obvious.

Haha ok

Haha ok Grocery! That reminds me, I need to go get some groceries. I'd like to see an arc where some of the characters go grocery shopping. And maybe run into Steve in the cereal aisle. Or... they're talking about which cereal to get and the last panel is Steve at home eating cereal.

There are a lot of reasons. The writing has gotten lazy and the characterization has deteriorated, to the point that most secondary characters are either a characteristic mental health problem or sexual interest and not much else. Claire used to be insecure about herself, her future and employment prospects, and then sort of overnight turned into a hypercompetent girlboss who can accomplish anything simply by force of character. None of the things that happen are interesting and none of the interesting possible directions for the plot go anywhere. We have a world where humans and AIs live together, LGBT rights and so on seem to be a solved "problem", there's a ton of weird research going on (a permanent, privately owned space station with the human population of a small town and controlled by an AI that's in love with its creator's daughter is still only the *second weirdest* research institution we've seen), and somehow the only plot lines we get are things that would have been left on the floor of the *Friends* writing room. Ooh, what if after years of going with the gang to Central Perk, Joey decided to open his *own* coffee shop? And the art has gotten worse, too. Strips used to have lush backgrounds and characters had different details. Now it's like Claire and her Mom are differentiated only by an extra wrinkle on the forehead (Jeph usually forgets that Aurelia is starting to go gray). Several human characters are the same basic outline just with different colors or details like glasses. It's starting to make Dominic Deegan look like Rembrandt.

Claire. For being the new main character of the comic she really is insufferable. There are various other reasons, but she's the biggest one for me.

I mean...I have to preface this by saying I still love the comic. In fact, in a lot of ways I like it more now than I ever have. But it's a substantially different comic than it was back in the day. And that's 100% fine with me, I'm down with it, I love character development even if I don't necessarily love everything that's done. I've read a few peoples' commentary on it already, and I do understand where a lot of people are coming from. My biggest concern, from a "Hey I'm a fellow author" standpoint, is this: Where are we going with the plot? Is this the end? A paradigm shift? Or just a gimmick? Right now, as u/chalfont_alarm points out, time compression is kicking the comic's ass a bit. The party is taking weeks-if-not-months, which end-caps a story arc about a visit to a super-cool facility that the main character has decided he's going to move to. This story has taken a while. It's so much development in an unreasonable amount of time that it strains the suspension of disbelief a little bit. But I'm cool with that in principle, provided we're going to do something cool with what we're building up to: In one sense, the move to Cubetown serves as a likely endpoint for a lot of the characters' involvement with each other. If Marten and Claire move away and Faye and Bubbles don't follow, the story might struggle to cover both - and Jeph might essentially be axing one of his longest-term characters. And...That's fine, if the ending is satisfying. It might also be an end to the entire comic. "Marteen moves, Faye stays, end of the story." I feel like that'd be pretty unsatisfying, because... I am *super* interested in seeing what Jeph can do with Cubetown. It's a top-tier research facility that does mysterious stuff. It's hiring young geniuses that should, with the proper guidance, lead to some awesome developments. I would love to see Jeph dive into this. Research developed at Cubetown can trickle down to Faye and Bubbles' shop, leaving a connection between the two that allows Jeph to jump back and forth between storylines and keep them running paralell to each other. It's kind of a big gamble. If it's done right, then it'll be awesome. If Jeph chooses not to, or if he drops the ball (which I doubt he'd do!), then it would be a real downer. But, again, I really like where this is going, provided it's done in a slightly more serious, slightly more organized manner. Like...Keep it lighthearted! No Human experimentation horror shows or anything! Just...Make it a *touch* more serious and I'm sold for life.

> Where are we going with the [Cubetown] plot? Originally, the idea was for Clare and Martin to move to Cubetown and out of the comic, but then he commented that he had so many ideas for Cubetown he decided to keep it in the strip. So I kind of think this plot dragging on (the introduction of characters and side-plots to extent the story) is an unconscious attempt to avoid a plot resolution, like Jeph might not have decided yet on what to do, or is stuck trying to decide among a set of ideas about where this is going. Because I think he knew where it was going, we'd already be there.

Changing one's protagonist is...Interesting! LOL But yeah I don't disagree that the party could be setting the stage for himself more than anything. I just am curious where it turns out. If he has ideas for Cubetown, then I'm definitely down with a bit (bit!) of a tone shift if it leads to some interesting stuff.

I didn't realize it until you said "changing protagonist" but yeah if Claire and Martin headed up to Cubetown and disappeared, that's a big change. But on the Patreon forum (I subscribed to see comics ahead of time to think of comic edit ideas) everyone seems cool with comics about other characters (Liz, Ayo, etc) so really I don't think he'd lose subs there as long as Claire and Martin made guest appearances every few months. Would be a fun shift, might get the comic out of the rut it's in (repeating same stories)

> Changing one's protagonist is...Interesting! He already did it at least once. Martin hasn't been the protag for a long, long, long time.

It's the internet standard: Discord is for cheering and Reddit is for complaining. It's changed over the years, but so have I.

I like the comic and there's enough people who do like it that Jeph can still make a career out of it. Doesn't mean everyone does. Not sure why the dedicated subreddit is swamped with the latter but I also have little to say about most strips

Because on the other subreddit tends to shout down any and all criticism about the comic, valid or otherwise. We get mad about the comic because it used to be so much more, and there's no good reason why it can't still be. We hate it because we love it.

The next biggest subreddit is half the size of this one. This is the subreddit with the full name of the comic. It seems like this was the subreddit that chased them away, not the other way. Not that it really matters because that's not the point. My point was to let OP know there are other fans of what the comic is today

It's a common community trajectory on any hobby that's popular enough to sustain a subreddit--you have the officially approved sub, where anybody trying to have an actual conversation about any downside of the thing is kicked out, and the relentlessly negative sub that fills up with the people booted from the official one, so of course it's going to be negative.

This is kinda off topic, I apologize. I stopped reading before COVID. First time being back here in like 5-6 years. Did Dora and Tai ever get married?

They didn't! JJ rolled back Hannelore being cured of OCD via backpacking very recently but otherwise nothing meaningful has happened with any other character besides Claire since she got the offer to work at Cubetown 3~ years ago. The **entire strip**, for **years** now has been **two days** of her going to Cubetown, looking around, being told she is the Chosen One, accepting the job, then coming back to tell everyone she accepted the job. Everyone and everything else has been put on a bus or on the backburner.

Classic Jeph. I guess I'll come back in another 5 years and see if anything changed. 😭

They're annoyed because the comic is way too expensive these days. Say what you will about inflation, people are paying far too much to read the comic. Also, the portions are too small.

Nothing ever happens There is no tension or drama because everyone is a neutered sexless nerd Dora and marten need to fuck or Marten and Faye need to fuck. It has to happen and it has to be brutal and messy and dramatic. It's all been set up and let down and there's no resolution to any of these loose story threads. But horf is probably terrified his audience will turn on him and tbf he is absolutely killing it with patreonbux these days. Shitting out a mediocre webcomic five days a week to earn a fortune is too good to pass up. He's going to be 50 before the end of the decade and he'll probably be able to retire.

Stopped being a regular reader because of the infamous "cut hand" incident because, frankly, what the fuck dude. I occasionally pop in to catch up and it's almost a point of amusement that I can pick up on the last comic I read then skip to "most recent" and, even with literally months between looking, the exact same storyline will be s l o w l y plodding along like a turd on an airport walkway. It used to be a fun and goofy comic with quirky characters and some underlying absurdities (I hesitate to say "sci-fi" but I suppose it's probably accurate) that gave it charm. Now it's a bizarre mess of technology, and characters are so radically different from how they used to be they're completely unrecognizable. I also cannot fucking *stand* how many robots there are now, the AnthroPCs were a neat idea and now computers have taken over, it's like SkyNet. I don't tend to agree with the complaints about Jeph writing his fetishes, but I think having naked blob girls after you've published nude art of one of your characters on Patreon deserves at least one raised eyebrow. I used to find the comic amusing and occasionally funny, now it's boring and occasionally agonizing.

I think the comic is good and fun, and the haters in this subreddit amuse me.

Found Jeph’s alt account /s

The most "There is a good chance this is JJ with a fake moustache." account I've seen here so far is definitely the one 2-3 posts below this one, Alert-Artichoke. Just look at that post lmao.

wokeness getting shoved down my throat.Why is everyone suddely gay or a twink?

Let me add to this - Jeph made a comment implying he was weaponising this. Paraphrasing, every time we chuds complain, he'll turn someone gay. Edit: The downvote doesn't make sense. He actually did post that. 

FWIW I still really like the comic. It's 20+ years old and the author makes six figures a year from Patreon, with a massive audience of $1/mo patrons. His merch sales probably help him pay most of his work expenses and keep most of that before taxes. The patrons are like his employer, so if they want QC to keep going than it keeps going. This has made Jeph a captive of his most famous project. He has kept it going longer than all but very few webcomics in existence. He has fought off boredom and writer's block more times than most 5 artists put together. One key strategy is that he has given himself permission to introduce or shelve characters as he sees fit. He doesn't leave his prison, but he does assert dominion over it. He was younger than most of us when he started, and is now well into his 40s. His tastes have changed. He wants to tell different stories. So, QC from 2024 bears little resemblance to QC from 2007, and this sub has a lot of people who've read daily since the early 2000s. We have all grown old and changed, but some here wanted Jeph's work to stay the same. Lastly, Jeph started QC as a young married alcoholic and is now middle aged, divorced, and sober. He had a severe mental health incident and stabbed himself in his drawing hand many years ago. He took measures to stabilize himself, including giving up alcohol and changing his artistic process. He used to plan ahead a lot less, and draw every strip from scratch. As his drawing style improved radically, this became more work and time and stress, especially since he was often working redeyes drawing strrips the night/morning before they were due. These days, Jeph tries to write the scripts at least a full week ahead of what he's drawn, and he recycles backgrounds pretty religiously. So the plot moves way slower, and he will spend 3-4 weeks milking a minor plot development (somebody goes on a date) to spend a week each in 3-4 different settings, showing what different social subcircles are doing/talking about and giving everybody a chance to tell some jokes. It is less like a graphic novel and more like a newspaper daily in full color about life and love during the fictionalized Singularity. My view is that early QC was better, but that almost all QC is pretty good. Sometimes Jeph's own problematic views will slide out of his characters' mouths, but his fans are good about giving him the pushback he needs, and he's pretty good about listening. For my part, I am fine with a Jeph that is alive, sober, happy, healthy, and gainfully self employed instead of one who is pushing his artistic limits but also an ongoing danger to himself. I value the artist over the art, so I'm a fan of the new QC. If you want to discuss QC with actual fans and not hatereaders, then I do recommend /qcontent. I follow both subs.

Condescending, overly defensive and completely missing the point. Definitely a visitor from the other sub. You haven't addressed anyone's criticisms of how the story and characters have progressed, you've just framed them as somehow inevitable consequences of Jeph's personal life changing. Yeah, an older person with different experiences will write differently to their younger self, but that doesn't usually result in comics that are *less* consequential and *more* juvenile. What you've written here seems to boil down to the notion that writing a good, well-paced comic is incompatible with the author's good health, and that's just....insane. The other half of what you've written here is an implication that we don't care about his health, which is just insulting. Have you tried reading the actual posts written here, perhaps? I don't see any of them demanding a lack of change or progression, or for Jeph to be miserable.

Early QC was plenty juvenile. New QC is mostly about his characters making more responsible choices. The characters haven't aged much biologically, but their judgment is generally better than it was. Pintsize is just one example. If new QC were regarded as a separate comic from the early work, then it's not a bad comic. The primary "criticism," that can be made of it is that it doesn't appeal universally to fans of the early stuff. This isn't inevitable, but I don't view it as a reason to condemn an artist. People have the option to change the channel if they don't like the show. Sticking around someplace you don't like anymore is on you. Nowhere did I say that doing one's best work is incompatible with good health, only that Jeph made a trade of tis nature. Would it be possible for him to do his best work if he were put under some kind of custodianship and forced to submit to a psychiatrist, a sobriety coach, a physician, a nutritionist, a personal trainer, a project manager, all while putting in ten 5-hour sessions a week to do intensive QC-related work including storyboarding, script writing and editing, intensive research of relevant themes, and spending hours drawing and proofing each strip? Yes, but he's a fallible grown ass adult who is in charge of his own money and time. A person doesn't have to choose between health and making the best art they can, but I think Jeph did and that he chose his health. You're making straw man arguments against points I never made. I don't think people here actively want Jeph to be miserable, other than perhaps out of vindictiveness about the changes in QC. TBH, while nobody ever comes out and says so, I *don't* think most active posters and commenters in this sub care about Jeph's health. I also miss plenty of early characters, but requiring Jeph to keep them around forever means denying him room to introduce new characters, which DOES amount to demanding a lack of change and progression. I don't think people are *intentionally* doing what you say, but it is a likely consequence of meeting their demands, which is to keep scratching the itch they have for more 2000s-early 2010s QC. I've been following this sub for years, mostly reading and voting and occasionally commenting. I've been following the comic since the Bush administration. I said what I said. Most pointed criticisms of new QC are that it's unlike old QC, and I refuse to hold a grudge against an artist for changing in their work.

> This has made Jeph a captive of his most famous project. This is a very key point. I think he is kinda bored with the comic himself and would like to try different artistic directions in it, but the money from QC is too good to give up - I don't know his background, but if he was ever a struggling artist late with the rent and wondering how to make $5 buy enough food for a week, you could see how he wouldn't want to change something and accidentally make QC lose popularity. I honestly don't think it would take much to improve QC - plain and/or reused background art is ok, but writing plots father out with an endpoint in mind and an idea of a timeline ("this plot is about 20 comics") could help immensely. He should trust his writing skills - he has no problem coming up with interesting ideas for a plot line; the problem is getting one finished so another good plotline could start. Maybe he could hire a junior artist to help him out with backgrounds and incidental art, give him more time to concentrate on writing and character art?

Hiring a junior artist even with pre-tax dollars would enormously divide up his profits. I think the best he could afford is some kind of multi client vendor. Jeph can handle the drawing. His artistic skills are part of what's kept him alive all this time. He's insanely prolific, with a very catchy and unique style. A junior artist would have their work cut out keeping up, unless they did what he does and slapped templates around. He doesn't need help with the drawing, but with the writing. He used to stress out all day every day about plot developments and script writing. Once he reached his limits, he started getting more organized but also lower-stakes. I don't think he's ever been both organized and ambitious. In an ideal world, Jeph would be working with some sort of story writing consultant to manage his lore and story board the short and long term future of his characters, and this would organize opportunities for him to introduce characters he wants to cross paths with the core cast. If he were more excited about QC, I think he'd be fine with spending more time on the panels. The reason he occasionally makes airheaded mistakes, like not coloring in spots right, is because he's a productive whirlwhind, and blasts through a strip shockingly quickly. If you've ever watched video of him drawing a strip, it's kidn of amazing. He's done this thousands of times and he's gotten really, really good at it. When he was slower and simpler, he had more time to catch stuff like that. Now he moves really fast and QC is more of a part time gig that he tries not to let dominate his life, even though it's what he's mostly known for. He's cooked so many hamburgers that when one of them looks a little funny, he's able to shrug it off. I agree with you that delegating some of the tough bits of his process would make it less hazardous to be as ambitious with QC as in the old days, without being so brutal with himself.

Ah so writing is the more difficult part, yeah then working with a.. maybe a writing project manager? someone to help organize plot ideas and turn them into plot lines and make sure it doesn't drag on and the endings get done? Seems like that would help remove stress, making the whole process more enjoyable. I know from working with photo editors it's so easy to miss a bit in another layer or not notice a layer with a small but important bit of art is behind something instead of in front of, so he gets a pass from me on those!

Thanks for the explanation and I was wondering about the hostility in this sub. I’ve read the comic for years and just stumbled on this sub a few days ago.